A top neuro-scientist who spent decades studying the human mind + imaging the human brain shares her celebrated research on where creativity, curiosity, and genius come from — and why those traits so often accompanied by depression.

about | the author

Nancy Andreasen MD, PhD is the Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa: Carver College of Medicine and the former editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

In year 2000, she was awarded the US National Medal of Science for pioneering the use of brain imaging to study cognitive processes and mental illness. Especially for her research in the social and behavioral sciences, through the study of mind, brain, and behavior. She used tech advances in neuro-imaging to study human memory and creativity, and disorders such as schizophrenia.

She uses modern neuro-imaging techniques to visualize the creative brain in action, examining both artists + scientists. Her lab also looks at the role of nature — vs. — nurture, and the relationship between creativity and mental illness.

many creative people are often, unfortunately, misfits in the school system

many creative geniuses also tend to share a common suffering with mental illness personally or in their families

society needs to evolve beyond the crushing stigma of mental illness

so that specials needs people can blossom with their natural abilities, and be helped with their disabilities

STORY EXCERPTS

As I spent more time with neuro-imaging technology, I wondered what we could find if we used it to look inside the heads of highly creative people. Would we see a little genie that doesn’t exist inside other people’s heads?

Today’s neuro-imaging tools show the brain’s anatomical structure with extreme precision. Researchers can study all sorts of connections between brain measurements and personal characteristics.

For example, we know that London, UK taxi drivers — who must memorize maps of the city to earn their cab license — have an enlarged region of the brain called the hippocampus, according to magnetic-resonance imaging — called MRI — scans.

Brain imaging studies of symphony orchestra musicians shows they have unusually large Broca’s area — a part of the brain in the left hemisphere. Using scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging — called f-MRI — we can watch how the brain behaves when engaged in activities or thinking.

Designing neuro-imaging studies is tricky. Capturing brain activity using imaging tech inevitably leads to over-simplifications, as we see in news reports that an investigator has found the “location” of something — love, guilt, decision-making — in a single region of the brain.

What are we even looking for when we search for evidence of “creativity” in the brain? So we have a definition of creativity that many people accept — the ability to produce something that’s novel or original and useful or adaptive — but achieving that “something” is part of a complex process, one often depicted as an “aha” or “eureka” experience.

For example scientist Isaac Newton’s formulation of the concept of gravity took more than 20 years and included multiple components: preparation, incubation, inspiration — a version of the eureka experience — and production. Many forms of creativity, from writing a book to discovering the structure of the human brain, require this kind of ongoing, iterative process.

With functional magnetic resonance imaging, the best we can do is capture brain activity in a human patient during brief moments in time while the person is performing some task. For instance, observing brain activity while test subjects look at photographs of their relatives. Creativity can’t be distilled into a single mental process — it can’t be captured in a snapshot. People can’t produce a creative insight or thought on-demand.

I spent many years thinking about how to design an imaging study that could identify the unique features of the creative brain. Most of the human brain’s functions arise from the 6 layers of nerve cells and their dendrites embedded in its enormous surface area, called the cerebral cortex — which is compressed to a size small enough to be carried around on our shoulders through a process known as gyrification — essentially, producing lots of folds.

Some regions of the brain are specialized, receiving sensory information from our eyes, ears, skin, mouth, or nose, or controlling our movements. We call these regions the primary visual, auditory, sensory, and motor cortices. They collect information from the world around us and execute our actions. But we would be helpless, and effectively non-human, if our brains consisted only of these regions.

But the most developed regions in the human brain are known as association cortices. These regions help us interpret and make use of the specialized info collected by the visual, auditory, sensory, and motor regions. For example, as you read these words on a page or a screen, they register as black lines on a white background in your primary visual cortex. If the process stopped at that point, you wouldn’t be reading at all.

To read, your brain, through miraculously complex processes that scientists are still figuring out, needs to forward those black letters on — so that meaning is attached to them, and then on to language ability in the brain, so that the words are connected to sentences, and on to associated memories and given richer meanings. These associated memories and meanings constitute a “verbal lexicon” — it can be accessed for reading, speaking, listening, and writing.

Each person’s lexicon is a bit different, even if the words are the same, because each person has different memories and meanings. One difference between a legendary playwright such as William Shakespeare and — for example — the typical stock broker, is the size and richness of his or her associations, and the complexity of other connections.

— notes —

Nancy Andreasen MD, PhD is Nancy Coover Andreasen
PBS is the Public Broadcasting Service